Catholics may then say we do not pray to saints we pray through them.  In other words, you don't pray directly to God when you pray to a saint.  You pray to God through the saint.  The saint takes your prayer to God to intercede and pray for you. 

The Church says that to honour the saint is to honour God for it honours what God has made the saint to be.

The Ten Commandments state that God forbids us to worship and pray to and honour and bow before anything in Heaven or earth or anywhere that is not God. 

The paganism and science of the time regarded the sun and moon as living persons or possibly as persons.  Yet the commandment banned prayer to them.  It didn't say that it is okay to pray to them as long as you think they are messengers of God.  There was no room for the idea that you could worship the sun the same way you would a saint as a being below God so saint-worship banned too.  The pagans prayed to their gods who were really saints.  The gods could lose their power if they wrong higher gods and so on.  They were like Catholic saints in the sense that they were not the boss.  God forbade praying to the heathen gods even if you turned them into holy saints who could intercede with a divine being for you.  He made no exceptions, not even if the gods were good and kind.

The Church says of sacrifice, animal sacrifice and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, that a sacrifice can only be offered to God, its destroying something for him to acknowledge God as creator.

It is offering prayer that makes sacrifice effective.  The prayerful offering is what really matters.  The sacrifice is no good without the prayer.  Sacrifice is a sacrifice of prayer.  Jesus used his blood-shedding as an offering and therefore a prayer.  Prayer is sacrifice and sacrifice is prayer.  So to pray to the saints is to make them Gods.

The saints' prayers either influence God or they do not.

If God is not influenced but decides to answer prayers because some saint asks him then this is rigged and contrived.  He is going through the motions of being influenced though he is not.  This kind of thing would make God a liar.

Only beings that are not all-knowing or imperfect can be influenced so the saints are the real gods if they influence God.  

If they do not influence God then they are

The most important saint in Catholicism is Mary the Mother of Jesus.

Mary knew that King Herod would want to kill her baby for he was the Messiah.  Yet she lingered around Palestine leading to Herod sending his men in to butcher all the baby boys.  She did nothing to avert this.

She left Jerusalem for home leaving Jesus in the Temple at 12 years of age.

She and Jesus' brothers opposed Jesus' ministry believing that Jesus was insane.

Jesus refused to listen to her when she stated that the wine had run out at the wedding at Cana.  He told her he wouldn't help.  He later changed his mind.  He decided to do it for his own reasons and not her's.

Jesus never denied that he was illegitimate.  He was legitimate because he had no human father.  Though we know he was born of a Virgin, he did not expect anybody who knew his mother to believe that he was legitimate.

That Jesus came from somebody like Mary and was the perfect man indicates surely that he had to have been the Son of God.

MY COMMENT: The Catholics say that going to God is like going into a party and going to your mother and ignoring all her friends.  This argument accuses you of rudeness and even sin if you don't like praying to saints.  It ignores how Catholics themselves do not pray to all the saints.  They have one or two favourites.  To say it is a sin not to involve the saints is definitely against the first two commandments which only demand love and worship for God alone.  Even if you may pray to the saints this is going too far.

Apart from offering sacrifice only to God, the Catholic talks to a saint the same way as she does God.  Sacrifice itself is only a form of prayer.  It may be a grim form but it remains a prayer.  So the Church cannot use sacrifice as an excuse for saying that the saints are not gods to it.  If a cheque is the sacrifice and the cash is not it is irrelevant to the fact that somebody is paid.

One reason why pagan idolatry was considered such an evil was that the gods were not considered masters of life and death and yet people were killing creatures to offer their lives to them.     What if a lamb was offered to St Anthony?  What if we start saying that it is okay to offer sacrifices to the saints as long as we offer only Jesus' sacrifice in the Mass to God?

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